Jame Grywinsk & Bruce Bain

Here are larger images of Bruce and Jame

Jame and his buddy Bruce are living on the streets of Calgary. They both are homeless and jobless. I spotted them while Jame was asking drivers at a crossing in downtown for spare money. After a moment I approached them and we chatted for a while.

Jame Grywinsk is 47 and was born in Winnipeg.
He has a son who is 21 years old but never saw him. His parents came from Ukraine to work in Canada. Jame himself worked in a steel mill.

One night he went out and got drunk.
He fell asleep in the cold and almost freezed to death. In that night he lost parts of all his fingers - since then he has clubbed fingers. After this incident he got laid of from the owners of the steel mill. He couldn't find a new job and became homeless.

When I mentioned that I am from Germany Jame mentioned that he likes the German rockband "The Scorpions".

Bruce Bain is 50 years old and was born in Edmonton (like William McKey). He lived in British Coloumbia for 5 years and came to Calgary in 1971. Here he worked, enjoyed going to concerts and begot a son in 1976.
Also Bruce never saw his son after the birth. According to him he doesn't do drugs or alcohol because his father died out of alcohol abuse.

Jame and Bruce usually sleep in parks and on the street because the available drop in centers are often overstaffed and reject people when their capacity is reached. They earn their living by asking peoples outside of bars or at street crossing for spare money. They need to collect 10-20 CAD to get over the day. At the weekend they usually don't sleep - otherwise they won't be able to collect that amount of money. Unlike many other homeless people they don't collect bottles - Jame can't grab them properly due to his lost fingers and Bruce had several bad experiences while doing this.

After talking to Jame and Bruce for about an hour I asked for their portraits. They granted it to me and we also made a group picture.
Before I left I helped them to come over this Sunday.

PS:
I updated the pictures from last week beginning here.